A Companion to the History of the Book (95 page)

To satisfy a different kind of information need, many entrepreneurs challenged convention by purchasing whole collections called “circulating libraries,” which largely consisted of “leisure reading,” and then for a subscription fee rented access to these books to anyone who could pay. Often these libraries were located in or near coffeehouses which functioned as popular, social gathering places; sometimes they were located near millinery shops frequented by women. Over time, circulating libraries increasingly specialized in novels, though such books were widely considered a waste of time, if not genuinely harmful. Increasingly, circulating libraries served women, whose literacy rate was catching up with men in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most complaints about novel reading came from men who little understood how women used this activity to challenge contemporary conventions on female social behavior, and construct a sense of community that patriarchy continued to deny them in public life.

About the middle of the nineteenth century, tax-supported libraries serving the general public began to appear in the Western world. After the British Public Libraries Act of 1850 authorized municipalities to collect taxes for the support of libraries, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham quickly established these civic institutions. In the United States, individual states passed similar enabling legislation in the last half of the century. The Boston Public Library, which opened its doors in 1854, became a prototype for many public libraries that followed (for example, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Los Angeles). Each trumpeted the provision of, and access to, “useful knowledge” as the public library’s primary community role; each defined itself as an educational institution which, along with schools and churches, constituted one of the three pillars of civilization. But while public library officials worked hard to identify and make accessible “useful knowledge,” they constantly met resistance from their publics, who instead mostly wanted novels. This put public libraries in an awkward position: they claimed a right to public funding as educational institutions, yet they had to satisfy popular desires for leisure reading or risk losing their clientele. That frustration is evident in a poem one anonymous librarian wrote to mime the lyrical construction of “Titwillow,” a song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Mikado:

At a library desk stood some readers one day,
Crying “Novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!”
And I said to them, “People, oh, why do you say

Give us novels, oh, novels, oh, novels?

Is it weakness of intellect, people,” I cried,
“Or simply a space where the brains should abide?”
They answered me not, or they only replied,

“Give us novels, oh, novels, oh novels!”

A librarian may talk till he’s black in the face

About novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!

And may think that with patience he may raise the taste

Above novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!

He may talk till with age his round shoulders are bent
And the white hairs of time ’mid the black ones are sent,
When he hands his report in, still seventy per cent

Will be novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!

(“Fiction Song,” 1890)

For generations thereafter, public librarians engaged in a war of subtle persuasion. The American Library Association (ALA), established by white, Anglo-Saxon, educated, middle-class men in 1876, three years later adopted as a motto: “the best reading for the greatest number at the least cost.” By the end of the century, the ALA had published standards that recommended that novels ought to total no more than 15 percent of a library collection, though novels consistently accounted for 65–75 percent of circulation across the nation. Many public libraries instituted limits: users could check out up to two books per visit, but only one could be a novel.

Ironically, in the late nineteenth century American librarians abdicated authority to define “the best reading” to a Northeastern literary establishment and to academics on campuses across the country, who were just then organizing into formal disciplines and departments. Because librarians trusted this new hierarchy of experts to identify “the best reading,” the ALA and the Library Association (a sister organization in the United Kingdom established in 1877) instead devoted their energies primarily to providing for “the greatest number at the least cost” by improving access systems and institutional management. These priorities effectively drew parameters around the discourse of librarianship, and quickly established its professional jurisdiction. Eventually, the practice of librarianship in most of the rest of the world followed this model.

Reinforcing these jurisdictional claims was a professional curriculum that originated with Melvil Dewey’s bootleg School of Library Service, which (against the wishes of trustees who wanted to protect their all-male campus) opened in an off-campus Columbia College (later University) storeroom in January 1887. Its first class of twenty included seventeen women, thus signaling to women who aspired to professional careers that they would be welcome in librarianship. Dewey’s students concentrated on learning the most efficient modern methods of library practice (developing collections, cataloguing and classification, retrieving information, and managing the physical plant and bureaucracy), and on developing a “library faith” – a conviction that the “best reading” which libraries made accessible was essential for democracy and an informed citizenry. Two years later, Dewey took his library school to Albany when he became New York State Library Director. The Albany curriculum became a model for most library schools established in subsequent years, each graduating new professionals intensely loyal to Dewey’s methods. Many of these graduates initially became itinerant cataloguers and classifiers, hired temporarily by municipalities to systematize book collections inherited from local social libraries being converted into public libraries. In many cases, local officials were reacting to pressure brought by elite women’s clubs that embraced the library faith and took responsibility for establishing local public libraries as a project of civic improvement.

All were players in a “public library movement” largely stimulated by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who between 1881 and 1917 spent $56,136,430.97 constructing a total of 2,507 library buildings in the United States (1,681 buildings), Canada (125), Great Britain and Ireland (660), New Zealand (17), South Africa (12), the West Indies (5), Australia and Tasmania (4), the Seychelles (1), Mauritius (1), and Fiji (1). His philanthropy doubled the size of the American public library system, greatly expanded the market for booksellers, and cemented into municipal budgets a sense of obligation to support an institution that constituted yet another effective mechanism for book distribution. By combining Carnegie’s largesse with Dewey’s library science, the public library became a ubiquitous, efficiently managed (if relatively low-profile) cultural institution. Any day of the week a stranger could walk into one of thousands of these institutions to see retired men pouring over newspapers in the reading room, children listening to someone reading aloud in the children’s room, or women checking out the latest popular novel over the circulation desk. During periods of high unemployment and cold weather, or late afternoons (after schools closed and before parents returned home from work), the number of visitors swelled; so did circulation. But throughout the twentieth century, library users continued to demand “novels, oh, novels, oh, novels,” and librarians had to supply them or lose valuable public support.

Collections and services in US academic libraries also mushroomed in the late nineteenth century. Many colleges across the country were transforming themselves from undergraduate institutions with well-defined classical curricula to universities that offered elective courses, supported graduate education, and gave research high priority. Academia also institutionalized and legitimated a literary canon, and then claimed authority to identify what fiction people ought to read. Dutifully, academic libraries collected these canonical titles and the published research that analyzed them. To support an elective system of courses and the research conducted by faculty and graduate students, college libraries greatly expanded their collections and services, including hours of opening. At Columbia, for example, between 1883 and 1886 nine departmental libraries were consolidated into one large, central facility, whose collections were identified in an elaborate public card catalogue and classified by the new Dewey Decimal system. Hours of opening were extended from four hours a day, three days a week to 8.00 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week.

Thereafter, Columbia (like most other institutions making the transition from classical college to research university) allocated a greater share of its budget to expanding collections, acquiring unique items that either attracted other donated collections or directly served the university’s curricular strengths and research needs. By the middle of the twentieth century, many university library systems had grown to include scores of departmental libraries scattered across campuses, each of which served particular clienteles. Academic libraries became primary markets for the scholarly books faculty research produced. And when returning World War II veterans and their children multiplied enrollments even more, academic library collections expanded along with them.

American school libraries experienced substantial growth in the wake of late nineteenth-century compulsory education laws. Many school boards, desiring to stretch state appropriations for library books, worked out cooperative agreements with public libraries which promised to make their books accessible to local schoolchildren. By the end of World War I, however, the National Education Association (NEA) began pressing for direct control over school library collections. It advocated the creation of separate libraries to be acquired, staffed, and organized by the school system specifically for teachers and students, and specifically in support of the school curriculum. In the 1920s, the NEA developed standards for elementary and secondary school libraries, and shortly thereafter some state and local governments started funding school library supervisors, issuing school library handbooks, and publishing recommended reading lists. The Depression interrupted growth, but in postwar America school libraries expanded their collections to include non-print texts. As a result, many transformed into “instructional media centers.” Then came the Great Society legislation of the mid-1960s, including the Library Services and Construction Acts, the Higher Education Act, and (particularly important to school libraries) the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Assisted by this funding, the percentage of public schools with libraries increased from 50 in 1958 (40,000) to 93 in 1985 (74,000), while the average size of their book collections increased from 2,972 to 8,466. School libraries across the globe emulated the American model.

Modern librarians have generally divided the world of libraries into four types: public, academic, school, and special. This last category constitutes a miscellany, into which are placed libraries of many kinds (including national libraries) that have had significant influence on the history of books. Examples in the US include research libraries like the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the Folger Shakespeare Library of Washington, DC, and the Newberry Library of Chicago; state library agencies (some of which, as in New York, function like national libraries for their states); law libraries; information centers for business and industry; and libraries attached to cultural institutions like art museums, music halls, and opera houses.

By the last quarter of the twentieth century, librarianship had sedimented into a set of traditional services carried out in tens of thousands of libraries in the Western world, hundreds of thousands across the globe. All wanted to provide “the best reading for the greatest number at the least cost,” but by this time systems to identify “the best reading” had established themselves outside the jurisdiction of librarianship. Generations of librarians had come to regard print largely as an object to be handled, and library practice focused much more on information access than information content. As a result, the profession concentrated on harnessing the latest technologies to improve service.

Meanwhile, influential intellectuals began arguing that economies in Western world countries were shifting from industry to services, and one of the most important services in this new economic order was the provision of information. In his
The Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962), Marshall McLuhan predicted “a paperless society.” In his
Understanding Media
(1964), he said the book was “like a dinosaur just before he disappeared.” These influential books were followed by Daniel Bell’s
The Coming of the Post-industrial Society
(1973) and Alvin Toffler’s
Future Shock
(1970) and
The Third Wave
(1980). All these arguments were grounded on the perceived potential of the computer, which had a tremendous capacity to process rapidly what in the nineteenth century had been called “useful information.”

For librarians, the catalyst that linked “best reading” to the kinds of “information” computers could handle best was F. Wilfrid Lancaster, a University of Illinois library educator who in 1978 published
Toward Paperless Information Systems,
one of the most cited works of library literature in recent times. That Lancaster made this prediction should not be surprising. His professional experience in science and technology libraries led him to value most the kinds of “information” his professional forebears often called “useful knowledge,” and because librarianship for the most part shared these values, librarians were easily persuaded that newer information technologies held the secret to the future of the profession.

Librarianship quickly turned from an “education” profession to an “information” profession (some even argued
“the
information profession”), and attempted to position itself as a major player in the “age of information,” in which “information” was redefined – one might even say “invented” – by the technology. In the absence of an adequate historical understanding of how terms like “useful knowledge” and “best reading” had morphed into “information,” many librarians dreaded predictions by information-technology evangelists that books and libraries would not survive the twentieth century. They also worried as they watched one of the library’s traditional user and support groups – middle-class professionals – begin to use computers for some of their information needs and thus bypass libraries more and more. The subtext to all this was a narrowed definition of “information,” one driven by technology and invented by powerful people with substantial self-interest in defining the parameters of “the information age.”